Furniture retailer Art Van has 4 new area stores in works

Tim Rank of Willson Builders in Toledo marks a floor before pinning concrete together as he and other company workers build an Art Van PureSleep store at Talmadge Road and Monroe Street.

Art Van Furniture, which is building a 90,000-square-foot superstore in Springfield Township, is also halfway through the construction of a smaller PureSleep store, one of three other standalone stores it plans to build in the Toledo area.

The company, based in Warren, Mich., plans to open the superstore early this summer on the site of a former movie theater complex in the Spring Meadows Shopping Center.

But during its groundbreaking in September, the company announced it also planned to open four local PureSleep stores. One of the PureSleep stores will be inside the Spring Meadows store, but executives of Michigan’s top furniture retailing chain planned to have three standalone locations — 4,000-square-foot stores that sell mattresses, pillows, and other bed accessories — in the area.

The location under construction, at the northeast corner of Talmadge Road and Monroe Street, is the only other site the company has secured thus far.

The PureSleep store at Talmadge Road and Monroe Street is one of four locations planned for Art Van in the Toledo area.

“We have nothing official at this time other than the Franklin Park location,” Art Van spokesman Diane Charles said.

The company is trying to secure two other locations, she said.

Each PureSleep store will have four employees. The showroom superstore in Spring Meadows will employ about 100 people.

The Toledo stores represent Art Van’s first venture outside Michigan, where it has 34 stores. Expanding outside of Michigan is part of the company’s strategy to double its $470 million in annual sales by 2022.

Art Van officials said they picked Toledo for this first non-Michigan location because the retailer already sells products to Toledo-area residents and makes deliveries here frequently. Also, the company believes the area has no dominant furniture retailer, and it has an opportunity to become the furniture sales leader locally.

Eventually, the company plans to expand to Cincinnati, Columbus, and Chicago.

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